05 JUN 2017 by ideonexus
Reading Fiction is to Temporarily Believe Nonsense
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like—what's going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But ... 1 
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notes25 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Laurie R. Santos & Tamar Gendler: Knowing is Half the Battle
The irony is that knowing that the G.I. Joe Fallacy is a fallacy is—as the fallacy would predict—less than half the battle. As is knowing that people tend to experience $19.99 as a significantly lower price than $20.00. Even if you know about this left-digit anchoring effect, the first item will still feel like a significantly better deal. Even if you know about ego depletion effects, the prisoner you encounter after lunch will still seem like a better candidate for parole. Even if you kn... 1 notes
notes24 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
For Want of a Nail
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. 1 notes
notesA rhyme for teaching consequences of small things.
24 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Better to Believe and Be Wrong Than Not Believe Anything
He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. . . . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart se... 1 notes
notesIf you believe a thing and are wrong, you can improve your beliefs in light of new evidence.
16 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Seeding Untruths as an Act of Rebellion
Conceding that the battle to stop documentation of people’s
private details and lives was a lost one, the Decepticons have
taken a different approach: make this data unreliable. Decepticon
hackers work hard to penetrate mesh databases and seed false
information. They have released numerous worms and trojans
into the wild with the sole purposes of gaining access to
archives, selecting random entries, and replacing the data with
autogenerated material (similar enough to pass, but false). Some... 1 notes
notesAs a protest against sousiveillance, some hackers turn to filling the Web with false data to make all data unreliable.
30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Our Collective Memory
Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. Tolstoy wrote about the foot soldier in the Napoleonic wars. The soldier he describes cannot have the experience of the war he is waging nor the battle he is fighting because the only “global” traces of the war are inscriptions—notably, maps and statistics. There is no scalable observation that mov... 1 notes
notesNo one soldier experiences a War. They experience details from their microcosm encounter with the war. The war itself is a collective memory experienced only in history books.
16 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
The British Empire Circled the World
With the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British Empire won "the world's power structures championship" and became historically the first empire "upon which," it was said, "the sun never sets." This is because it was the first empire in history to embrace the entire spherical planet Earth's 71-per¬ cent maritime, 29-percent landed, wealth-producing activities. All previous empires—Genghis Khan's, Alexander the Great's, the Romans', et al.— were unified European, North African, and Asian-... 1 notes
notesOrigin of why the "sun never sets" on this Empire.
03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
A Multi-Bodied Alien Considers a Single-Bodied One
Even if there had been no Dataset, even if Johanna Olsndot had not come from the stars, she would still be the most fascinating creature in the world: a pack-equivalent mind in a single body. You could walk right up to her, you could touch her, without the least confusion. It was frightening at first, but all of them quickly felt the attraction. For packs, closeness had always meant mindlessness—whether for sex or battle. Imagine being able to sit by the fire with a friend and carry on an i...Folksonomies: otherness
Folksonomies: otherness
1 notes
notesA race of aliens like wolves, who form beings made of packs that share thoughts through short-range sounds, so that they cannot get too close to other packs without getting their thoughts confused, wonders at a little human girl.
03 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Pavlov's Conditioning and Humans
The dog [in Pavlov's experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of th...Folksonomies: psychology conditioning
Folksonomies: psychology conditioning
1 notes
notesHumans can be conditioned by a single experience, while the dog must have regular conditioning to continue salivating at the sound of a bell.
